Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Lord Alanbrooke’s ignorance, based on his illiteracy in scientific matters, was shared by almost all military men of all armies in the world and by the overwhelming mass of politicians as well. Among the latter group was Stalin, but fortunately not Truman. The President on July 18th ordered the second bomb to be dropped on Japan as soon as it was ready, and on July 24th he chose the list of possible targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Nigata, and Nagasaki. Secretary Stimson, moved by the tears of Professor Edwin O. Reischauer and his own memories of the place, persuaded the President to drop from the list Kyoto, a city of temples, shrines, and artistic treasures. These cities were already being spared from B-29 air raids to reserve them for the test of the atom bomb.

On this same day Truman told Stalin of the successful test. There is no doubt that the President, in order to discourage any questions from Stalin, overdid the casualness of his communication. Moreover, he spoke to him aside, using a Russian interpreter whose English was limited. Truman’s own account shows that Stalin either did not understand or was ignorant of the fact that an atomic explosion was a significant event. The President wrote:

“I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make good use of it against the Japanese.”

It seems likely that Stalin’s personal interest in atomic fission in July 1945 was about the same as that of Lord Alanbrooke, although, as we shall see in the next chapter, lesser men in the Soviet system were more aware of the significance of the subject.

The atom bomb thus seems to have played no role at Potsdam. General Marshall and Secretary Stimson, as well as Churchill, realized that Soviet assistance was no longer needed to defeat Japan, but no move was made to avoid such intervention. It is, however, extremely likely that the frantic and otherwise inexplicable haste to use the second and third bombs, twenty-one and twenty-four days after Alamogordo, arose from the desire to force a Japanese surrender before any effective Soviet intervention.

The chief task of Potsdam was to lay the basis for a peace settlement. This was to be worked out, in each case, by a council of foreign ministers of the Big Three, France and China, using general principles agreed on at Potsdam. These principles were vague and were interpreted or violated subsequently so that, on the whole, the Soviet Union achieved what it wished east of the Oder River and Adriatic and north of Greece, while the Western Powers obtained their general desires west and south of these boundaries. As usual, the chief problem was Germany. There the Soviet Union still wanted some kind of partition in order to dominate the fragments, while, in the west, only France, from continued fear of Germany, sought to fragment and weaken that country, while the English-speaking countries wanted as unified an administration as feasible and a level of economic revival sufficient to make American economic aid unnecessary. In addition, the United States was determined to avoid any repetition of the 1920’s when German reparations had been paid to the other victors from resources borrowed from the United States.

The chief principles for postwar Germany, as established at Potsdam, were: (1) permanent and total disarmament and dispersal of all military forces; (2) complete de-Nazification of public and private life; (3) nullification of all Nazi discriminatory laws; (4) punishment of individuals guilty of war crimes and atrocities; (5) indefinite postponement of any central German government (and thus of any German peace treaty), but maintenance of a central, national, administrative machine to be used by the Control Council for economic activities of national scope; (6) decentralization and democratization of political life and of the judicial system; (7) a multiparty system with only Nazi groups forbidden; (8) democratization and westernization of German education; (9) establishment of basic Western freedoms of speech, press, religion, and labor-union activities.

On the economic side, it was agreed that Germany should be treated as a single economic unit, with uniform control measures in all zones, aimed at establishing a consumer-oriented economy, under German control, and able to ensure maintenance of occupying forces and refugees, with a standard of living for the Germans themselves no higher than that of non-Russian continental Europe. This somewhat modified version of the Morgenthau scheme (which had sought the complete ruralization of German economic life to an agrarian basis) was modified almost at once by a number of factors.

The first modifying factor was the desire for reparations. The Americans insisted that reparations must be taken, as far as possible, from existing stocks and plants rather than from future production (a complete reversal of the American position of 1919) in order to avoid the error of the 1919-1933 period, the overbuilding of German capital equipment and American financing of German reparation payments into the indefinite future. No total and no division of reparation benefits were set, but it was provided that all reparations come from Germany as a whole and be credited to the victors on a percentage basis. To administer this, to escape from Polish reparation claims, and to get the Russians out of the Italian question (so that that country could become a partner of the Western Powers), Secretary Byrnes worked out a complicated deal.

The central basis for this deal was that Germany had an industrialized west and an agricultural east. The Soviet Union wanted reparations from the industrial plants of the west, while the United States and Britain wanted agricultural products (not reparations) from eastern Germany to feed the western Germans and the millions of German refugees and repatriates who were pouring westward from all Communist-dominated areas of the east and from the lands lost to Poles, Czechs, and others. In simple terms, Byrnes’s compromise was that each country take reparations from its own zone, but that Russia would get 40 percent of the heavy war industrial equipment of western Germany for which it would pay for only 25 percent in food, coal, and other basic needs from the east. From this total the Soviet Union would pay the reparation claims of Poland, release Italy from all Russian reparation claims, and agree to the immediate admission of Italy into the United Nations.

One of the critical events of this period was the Soviet refusal to supply food or coal to the areas of Berlin occupied by the democratic Powers. This and the millions of Germans streaming westward to seek refuge beyond the reach of vengeful Russians, Poles, and Czechs played a great role in arousing sympathy for Germans in the west and in establishing a common front of cooperative work and mutual dependence in that area.

On July 26, 1945, Truman, Attlee, and Chiang Kai-shek issued an ambiguous ultimatum to Japan, warning the latter that it must accept immediate unconditional surrender or suffer complete and utter destruction. This was regarded by the three leaders as a threat of atomic holocaust unless Japan laid down its arms, but the atomic threat was unspecified and, to the Japanese, meaningless, while their chief concern, whether “unconditional surrender” meant removal of the emperor, was equally unspecified. The Japanese premier, Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, who had been put into office to find a way out of the war, was caught in a trap. If he made any serious effort to surrender, he could be murdered by the militarists, while his secret efforts had been rebuffed by the West as too vague. To ward off the former, he made a public statement that the Potsdam Declaration was “unworthy of notice.”